For over 3 years now I’ve been hosting a weekly event in Philadelphia called Dev Night. The main purpose of this event is to help grow and centralize the gaming community in Philadelphia. One thing above all others accomplishes this task: our Monthly Game Jams.

It’s Philly Tech Week here, which means lots of events, meetings, and conferences. Many business cards exchanged, many more names told and quickly forgotten because let’s face it, we’re all terrible at names. But more often than not, every new conversation starts with the same four words:

As you may or may not know, every month we host a Game Jam at Dev Night. The scope is small, and the deadlines are tight; we think it’s the best way for everyone in our community to get better at making games.

We’re at a point now where we’ve seen trends come and pass and we’ve seen different markets rise and fall. It’s a deeply interesting and scary thing to swim in, because we need to constantly reinvent ourselves to stay afloat. And today, we’re unfurling the sails of our new ship.

We’ve been listening to user feedback and we’ve made some changes to Intake. We’ve been hearing that lots of people are having some problems at level 5. So to fix that, we are giving new players 5,000 mg at the start of the game. Now you can buy a life right off the bat! Also we updated Intake so that special levels start appearing at level 10, rather than level 5.

Hello all, I’m Mary (@MaryKCassin), and I’m the new intern here at Cipher Prime. I’m currently a rising junior at Ringling College of Art and Design studying Game Art and I’ve been interning here since the beginning of May.

For the Global Game Jam this year, our team wanted to make a game that behaved like a personality test. It would try to determine if you liked killing enemies, collecting items, running around wildly, or interacting with the game’s inhabitants. Once the game had a handle on what you preferred, it would tailor itself to your desires. If you liked killing things, more enemies would be spawned. If you spent a lot of time in rooms opening chests, the next rooms you went to would have more in them to explore. It was immediately apparent that a predesigned level wouldn’t work, as we wanted the experience to be dynamic and different for each type of player. So, we needed some sort of procedural room generation, and we needed it fast. I was responsible for that feature, and found it so interesting that I wanted to share how I handled it.

It’s early morning. Light spills through the tall Old City windows into a mostly empty office here at the Philly Game Forge, and shines on a collection of weird plants I grew out of random stolen clippings from a restaurant down the street. My mornings usually start quiet with the plants and morning light. And coffee. It’s good times.I’m sitting here trying to figure out how to fit all I want to say about my experience so far at Cipher Prime into a blog post. It’s unlikely I will accomplish that, but here’s my best shot!